Mixed Signals

by Diane Barnes

  The picture has 147 likes and two comments. The first is from Ellie: Looking good, you two. The second is from my mother: Handsome. Is he the “friend” Christian told us about? Her use of quotation marks makes me want to die.

  In the distance, a group of kids on scooters make their way toward me. Ellie is behind them. She sees me and waves, a huge grin on her face as if I invited her here to share good news. When she reaches me, she squeezes my wrist, a playful light in her eyes. “Tell me everything that happened.”

  “There’s nothing to tell. It was a disaster.”

  Her eyes dim like the lights in a movie theater just before the show starts. “What happened?”

  As we walk, I explain how things got off to a good start with Ben bringing me flowers, but then steadily declined with the first glass of wine in my apartment.

  “By the time the band was playing, he didn’t even want to dance with me.”

  “It makes no sense,” Ellie says. “I saw a picture Renee posted. He looks so into you.”

  “He was really insulted.” I kick a rock and watch it skid across the pavement, bouncing off the shoe of a man walking a few feet in front of us. He turns to look at me, so I mutter an apology.

  “What do you mean, he was insulted? I would think he would have been flattered.”

  “He said he used to have a crush on me, but now he basically thinks I’m pathetic.”

  Ellie stops to unzip her sweatshirt and tie it around her waist. “What exactly did you say to him?”

  “He was giving me a hard time for not being over Nico, so I suggested he help me move on.”

  “By having sex with you?”

  The man in front of us looks back at us over his shoulder. Ellie and I both glare at him until he turns away from us.

  “Well, I didn’t come right out and say it, but he got my gist.”

  “Oh, Jillian. You weren’t supposed to tell him the reason you wanted to sleep with him. You were supposed to have fun, flirt with him. One thing would lead to the other.”

  My face burns in embarrassment. “When he dropped me off he said it’s not that he didn’t want to, but that the timing wasn’t right. What does that mean?”

  “It means he was trying to let you down easy.”

  We walk in silence as we pass a group of children feeding the geese in the pond. Once we get by them, Ellie asks, “Were you drunk?”

  “I’m done talking about this. Time to move to plan B.”

  “What’s that?” Ellie asks. “Or should I say, who’s that? Lucas?”

  “Very funny, wise guy. Sleeping with Ben was your idea,” I remind her.

  “That’s because I was secretly hoping something would come of it.”

  Her words cause a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I’m not sure why.

  Chapter 27

  Plan B is online dating, and I can’t believe I’m resorting to it. The whole drive home I had to talk myself into it. I finally convinced myself it’s no different than shopping on Zappos, Rue La La, or Amazon. Instead of buying shoes, clothes, or books, I’m looking for a boyfriend, or at least a date—or someone to help me move on with my life.

  Back in my apartment, I log in to the site and guide my cursor to the activate profile button. My finger hovers over the mouse. I count backward from three and click. My profile goes live. I stare at the computer, waiting for something to happen. Nothing does. Well, what did I expect, a bunch of hunky men to burst through my screen?

  A button at the top of the screen that says Design Your Ideal Mate catches my attention. Who wouldn’t be intrigued by that? I click on it. Answer these questions to describe the person you most want to date. Two buttons appear under the text: Male or Female. I click on male. A long questionnaire appears, beginning with Choose an age range for your ideal mate. While the directive seems harmless enough, it depresses the hell out of me because it reminds me of how old I am. In less than a month, I’ll be closer to fifty than twenty. How can that be? I select thirty-five to forty-four, only because there isn’t an option that allows me to choose thirty-five to thirty-nine. I don’t want to date a forty-year-old.

  Before I move on to the next question, my computer dings. A picture of a man with chubby cheeks and a dark crew cut pops up, filling half my screen. Next to it, an instant message appears: You have beautiful eyes.

  Whoa! Can he see me? I roll my chair away from the computer. Relax, Jillian. He’s looking at your picture. Still, I’m creeped out and leave the room. Thirty minutes later when I return, the message is still there, but now under it in smaller text it says Passion Pete has signed off. Passion Pete. Who’s going to contact me next, Horny Hank? Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.

  More wary now, I resume creating my ideal mate. I answer a dozen questions about physical appearance. As I review my answers—light brown hair, green eyes, taller than five ten—I start to feel twitchy, realizing the ideal mate I’m creating looks nothing like Nico but exactly like Ben. I get the same sinking feeling in my stomach that I had at the pond with Ellie this morning and wonder if the reason I want to sleep with Ben has more to do with the fact that I’m attracted to him than getting over Nico.

  I go downstairs for an ice-cold glass of water to help me clear my mind. Over the past few months, Nico’s coat hanging over the back of the chair has become as familiar a sight as the gray vinyl tile on my kitchen floor. I don’t even notice it anymore. Today it jumps out at me the same way a broken egg on the tiles would. I think about how Ben reacted when he saw it last night, how that stupid jacket ruined the good vibe we had going when he first arrived. Perhaps it is time to get rid of it. I can’t throw it away though. It’s a perfectly good jacket. I promise myself I will donate it to a charity’s coat drive. In the meantime, I hang it in the back of the hallway closet.

  I return to my desk, ready to move on. Twenty minutes later, I have completed all the preferences for my ideal mate. If only I could press a button and have him shoot out of my printer. Now that would be something. Instead I press Search and a list of the closest matches appears.

  Before I can read through it, my doorbell rings. By the time I make it downstairs, I hear footsteps outside walking away. I throw open the door. Mr. O’Brien is halfway across the porch to his place. He walks back to my side of the house.

  “What took you so long?” he asks.

  I was soliciting strangers on the Internet for a date. “I was upstairs.”

  “I have to get in there,” he says. He pulls the storm door open and steps forward.

  I block his path because I hate that he never gives me any notice before doing work on my apartment. When Nico lived here, Mr. O’Brien always called before coming over. “Why?”

  He clears his throat and points up. “The ice dams. I have to make sure they didn’t do any damage, check for leaks.”

  “There aren’t any.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Well, I haven’t noticed any.”

  “I’m coming in,” he says, brushing past me and heading for the stairway.

  “You don’t have to go up there.” I exhale loudly as he traipses through my apartment, leaving his usual trail of sandy wet footsteps behind him. “I would have noticed if the ceiling is leaking.”

  He pauses on the third step, turns around, and looks at me through narrowed eyes. He clears his throat again. “Am I interrupting something? Is there someone up there?”

  “What? No!” I wish!

  He eyes the top of the stairs suspiciously.

  “There’s no one up there.” For crying out loud, he saw Ben drive away last night.

  I follow him up the stairs, noticing the brown age spots on the back of his hand sliding along the railing as he slowly makes his ascent. At the top of the staircase, he pauses to look upward. Nothing there but a pristine white ceiling. He proceeds down the hall to my bedroom. I cringe as he enters because it’s a mess. The dress, nylons, and shoes I wore to Renee’s party are piled in a heap at the foot of my unmade be
d, along with the dress I didn’t wear. A laundry basket overflowing with clothes that need to be folded or ironed sits in the middle of the room. A collection of half-empty water bottles lines my nightstand, and the curtains are still closed tight. “Cleaning lady’s day off?” he asks.

  “There are no stains,” I say.

  “What are those?” he asks, pointing to the smattering of glow-in-the-dark star decals stuck to the ceiling.

  Nico put them there to surprise me. We had planned a week away, camping in Acadia National Park, but I got sick, the flu. In July. Even my doctor couldn’t believe it. It’s not something we usually see this time of year, she said. So while I was sacked out on the couch huddled under an electric blanket to fight off the chills while spiking a fever with a 102 temperature, he was upstairs turning our bedroom ceiling into a night sky so I could pretend I was sleeping outdoors. The memory makes me smile.

  “I like to sleep under the stars,” I say.

  Mr. O’Brien shakes his head. “Then sleep outside. Don’t destroy my ceilings.”

  As we make our way down the hall, he keeps his eyes up, but there is no water damage. I wait in the hallway while he checks the bathroom. “What stinks in here?” he asks.

  For the love of God. I lean into the room. “Nothing!”

  “It’s this!” He picks up my mulberry and thyme diffuser.

  “It’s an air freshener. It smells good.”

  He returns it to the vanity. “I prefer to light a match.”

  Great. Now an image of him sitting on the toilet pops into my head. His tan pants are bunched around his ankles, exposing his skinny pale legs and thick black socks. He’s reading a newspaper, and there’s a book of matches on the hopper’s tank, waiting to be lit.

  He follows me to my office. From the doorway, I see the Ideal-Mate website filling up the twenty-seven inches of my iMac’s screen. I freeze. Mr. O’Brien bumps into me. “What are you doing stopping like that,” he grumbles.

  “Nothing to see in here either,” I say.

  He nudges his way past me. Of course, he heads straight for my desk. His eyes narrow as he looks toward the computer. I think about diving across the room and ripping the plug out of the outlet.

  Mr. O’Brien leans closer to the screen. The website’s slogan, Meet Your Ideal Mate, fills the top half. “What’s this?” he asks.

  There’s no way I’m explaining this to him.

  He clears his throat. “Are you doing Internet dating?”

  “What’s wrong with that?” I ask, surprised that he knows about it. “It’s how single people meet other single people these days.” I hate myself for feeling the need to defend myself.

  “I’ve heard about these sites on the news,” he says. “It’s how young women get themselves killed.” His mouth twists. “Meeting strangers on the computer, getting in the car with them or going to their houses. Why do you want to do something like that?” He’s still facing my monitor, his eyes traveling up and down, looking at the pictures of my ideal matches.

  “How else am I going to meet someone?”

  “Meet them in real life. Like we did before these newfangled devices became so popular.” He motions with his hand like he’s trying to shoo away my computer. “Grocery stores, church, the laundry mat.”

  My seventy-four-year-old landlord is giving me dating advice. Perfect.

  “The key is that you have to keep your eyes open,” he says.

  I step around him and minimize the screen. “Where did you meet Carol?”

  He flinches at the mention of his dead wife’s name. “At work. She was the boss’s daughter. Came in to help with the phones one day when the regular girl was out sick.” He actually smiles as he speaks. I picture him younger, chatting up a secretary while she ignores the ringing telephone behind her. It’s one of those old-fashioned ones with the rotary dial. “There must be single men in your office,” he says.

  Ben’s face flashes through my mind. “No one I can date,” I say. “That was risky, asking out the boss’s daughter.”

  “Pshh. Dating someone you meet on the computer is risky,” he says. “Especially when you’re too distracted to notice what’s right in front of you.” He points to a large yellow stain on the ceiling above my desk. “It’s practically dripping on your head. I don’t know how you missed it.”

  Chapter 28

  There is no traffic on Monday morning as I drive to work. In fact, there isn’t even another car on the highway with me, making me wonder if I missed a detour that bypasses this road.

  On the radio Branigan is taking calls. “And on line two we have a caller who claims to work with Jillian,” he says.

  Here we go again. With the lack of traffic, I thought I might be headed for a good day, but no. I wonder which of my coworkers is selling me out and quickly settle on Ryan. I turn up my radio, waiting to hear what he’ll say.

  “So how long have you worked with Jill?” Branigan asks.

  “Four years.” I almost drive off the road when I hear the caller’s voice because it is most definitely not Ryan’s. It’s Ben’s. “Guess what she asked me to do to help her get over Nico?”

  Maybe I should drive off the road? Why is he doing this to me?

  “Why don’t you tell us,” Branigan says.

  Behind me, someone honks. I look in the rearview mirror, surprised to see bumper-to-bumper traffic. Where did it come from so suddenly?

  “She solicited me,” Ben says.

  I feel like he punched me in the gut. Why would he call the show to tell the world that?

  “She did the same thing the night of the company holiday party too,” he says. “Which was the night after she got engaged.”

  I might hate Ben more than Nico right now.

  Behind me there’s beeping again. I glance in my rearview mirror. It’s Mr. O’Brien driving an eighteen-wheeler that is bearing down on me.

  The honking gets louder as the truck rear-ends me. I hit my head on the steering wheel and black out. I wake up in my bed with my alarm clock blasting and Mr. O’Brien banging on the wall.

  It’s Monday morning. Time to go back to work and face Ben again. Clearly, I’m dreading it.

  * * *

  Neither Renee or Ben is at the office yet when I arrive. I breathe a sigh of relief and hope that Ben has decided to take the day off. In my cube, I log into the radio station’s website to see if the stupid survey is still active. I find that it is—sort of. There is a survey, but it now reads, Did Nico make a mistake breaking up with Jill? I don’t believe for a second that the radio station posted this question. More likely, Lucas and Ben are at it again. They must have hacked the site before Renee’s party, because Ben wouldn’t have wanted to help me after it. The headline is the only thing they messed with because Yes still accounts for more than 98 percent of the responses, but because of the way the question is worded, those respondents are now on my side.

  I turn on my radio to hear what Branigan is saying about the survey. “Whoever is messing with our website scored big this weekend,” he says. “Nico and Bonnie had a falling out this weekend and decided to call it quits. Today, he would probably be part of the majority of respondents who think he made a mistake breaking up with Jillian.”

  “Jill never tried to change me,” Nico whines.

  Nico and Bonnie broke up. I thought when I heard that news my spirits would soar like a helium balloon released from a child’s hand. Instead, I feel nothing, except curiosity about what they fought about. Did he leave his jacket hanging over the back of his chair? Pile his dirty dishes and glasses by the sink, expecting her to wash them, or was it something more serious?

  My thoughts are interrupted by footsteps and voices in the aisle. I didn’t hear the door open so am surprised by the sound of them. “Did you have a good time?” Renee asks.

  “Sure,” Ben answers. “I enjoyed meeting your friends.”

  “Did you have fun with Jill?” She says it in a teasing voice.

  I remain perfec
tly still, waiting for his response. There’s a long pause. “I hate seeing her so hung up on Nico still,” he finally says.

  A few seconds later, he enters his cube and looks over the wall into mine. “You’re here already?” he asks.

  I nod but keep typing and don’t turn to face him, hoping he’ll think I’m busy and leave me alone.

  “Do you want to go to the cafeteria and grab a coffee?” he asks.

  “I have to finish this,” I say, my fingers dashing across the keyboard.

  “Jill, we should talk.”

  “Later. I have to get this to Stacy.”

  He stands where he is, watching me, until his phone rings.

  * * *

  I successfully avoid Ben all morning. At lunch, he leaves the building with Lucas while Renee and I eat in my cube, reviewing the profiles of the few men who contacted me on the online dating site. The picture we’re looking at now is of a pudgy blond man with deep dimples.

  “He’s absolutely adorable. I want to eat him up,” Renee says, taking a bite of her tuna sandwich.

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t seem too smart.” I point to the last line of his message. Lets meat. You definately won’t be sorry.

  “Oh, honey,” Renee says. “At your age, you can’t be ruling out potential dates because of their spelling.”

  I flinch at her words. When I was a teenager imagining my life in my midthirties, I assumed I’d have a handsome husband; two beautiful children, Amanda and Trevor; and a golden retriever named Agassi. We’d go for nice long walks through our tony neighborhood, my husband holding Agassi’s leash with one hand and mine with his other. Our dark-haired kids would be riding their bikes in front of us, Amanda arguing that she was ready for the training wheels to come off and Trevor wanting to stop the ice cream truck. It never occurred to me that I’d be searching a website, looking for a man who is husband material.